


Unduly Familiar

by cortanaG



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Chemistry Building, Cruiser Hardships, F/M, Post Episode: s04e06 Nomad Droids, Power Dynamics, Rare Pairings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-15 07:15:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29929839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cortanaG/pseuds/cortanaG
Summary: An unorthodox (and entirely obvious) dynamic has been brewing between Adi Gallia and Commander Wolffe.When the attraction becomes too apparent to deny, Adi suffers inner turmoil at the concept that there are some natural emotions in which not even the selfless lifestyle can control.
Relationships: Adi Gallia/CC-3636 | Wolffe
Kudos: 1





	Unduly Familiar

Adi Gallia feared the aftermath of wartime tribulations for only one reason: the fucking paperwork. 

Grievous’s invasion upon her cruiser had been tactful to the minimal degree of administering surprise. So, when she was kicked down the hallway like she was a piece of godsdamned shrapnel and her forces were inevitably overwhelmed, Adi struggled to diffuse a swell of ignited blood. 

Adi didn’t have distinguishable issues with her anger, but her casualty count had been higher than she’d preferred, and ferociously conversing her saber blade with four soulless relics of dead Jedi didn’t sit well with her, either. 

Commander Neyo would require her in the bridge center any minute now. She was holed up in a senior officer’s cabin, which had been the immediate hideout after Master Plo handed her the thick stack of datapads needed by the next cruiser rendezvous. 

Adi had quickly stripped down when she was finally in her private quarters and tossed on a sleeveless tunic. She didn’t deserve to take a shower, she told herself, but it wasn’t like she had time for such indulgences anyway. 

Adi had sat at her desk until the furtive scribbling of her stylus and the slime of chagrin snaking up her spine forced her to sit back with a sigh. She had never been the high maintenance type, even when it came to mental restoration, but she resented herself in hindsight for believing paperwork could substitute for meditating. 

She had lowered herself to the mat on the floor of the cabin and used the disc of a holoprojector to transmit a request for her cousin’s responder, instead. 

Adi had been well into her conversation with the blue hologram of Stass when the anticipation of Neyo’s call shot out like a beacon from the back of her mind. 

“I’d have crashed in the sparring complex, if I were you,” Stass said thoughtfully. A hoarse jam in the vocal emitter laid thick over her voice, but Adi was accustomed to her cousin’s foibles enough to do the tonal translations herself. 

She’d been prancing skittish around anyone in the 91st, and the cruiser gym would no doubt be their temporary hive until rendezvous. Stass then babbled over Adi’s train of thought, 

“Actually, no. I couldn’t have a clone watching me work out. I know they leave, like, a fifty-meter radius whenever a Jedi walks onto the floor, but still. They’re all so  _ fit, _ and I wear my baggy robes for a reason, you know?”

Adi’s hands crept over the curves of her bent knees, and she exhaled slowly at the ceiling. She reveled in her own patience, sometimes. 

“We’re not going over that again. You know not a single one of them makes observations like that.” Guilt and adrenaline were still riddled through her veins, refusing to fizz out. They didn’t parley well with the shame she felt at assuming she knew what occupied a clone in his free time as if they came with an intricate manual.

“I’m fine where I am, Stass,” Adi said quickly, before she could think too hard on it. “Grievous just….threw me off this time, I suppose.”

“Oh, nothing you can’t handle.” Stass had a face mapped out in curved, soft features, all of which were now strained and shuddered in a series of choppy, grainy lines. From where she loomed before Adi’s criss-crossed position, Stass narrowed her eyes at her cousin. 

“You called me about not being able to cope with your stress?”

_ “Stress?” _ Adi blinked for a second, having forgotten she’d gone with that route of description.  _ Guilt-ridden _ and  _ devoid of a clear conscience _ had been more what Adi glanced at in the mirror prior her paperwork frenzy, with her cheeks sunken and hollowed out like the Force had been sucked from her soul. 

“Maybe that’s what it is, I think. Sure.”

“You don’t look stressed to me, Adi,” Stass remarked, like she was the pinnacle of reassurance. 

To Adi, family was family, and they had grown comfortable sharing even the most intimate details with each other, to the point where Adi considered it sinful, but on occasion their contrasts could be too stark for a fruitful venting session. 

“Perfectly calm and collected, maybe. Like how normal people look while watching a holovid.”

“Stass, please.” 

She was appalled she’d even reached out of the depths of her own comfort to ease her unconventional agitation. The decision to contact her cousin for advice about anything other than a headdress malfunction would haunt Adi for the rest of her life. 

“Alright, okay.” Stass was clearly oblivious to how irritatingly flippant each note in her voice was. “Have you meditated?”

“No. I haven’t. I’ve been sitting in this godsdamned cabin, filling out captive imparts.”

“Right. Have you tried….anything else?”

Adi tensed. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I suggested the  _ ‘mats room,’ _ but you obviously seem content on not leaving your little bedroom there.”

“Yes.”

“You want to know what I’d have really done?” Stass’s lips stretched into the kind of devious grin that made Adi freeze with wretched apprehension. Her cousin continued, “Look, so it’s always better when your pants are completely off….”

“Stass I  _ swear -” _

“Hear me out!” Stass exclaimed, and the projection jiggled awkwardly as she burst into a fit of laughter. “You wanted my help. Be open.”

Adi applied a manufactured breeze of calm to recoup herself. She noticed how quickly her heart pelted against her chest. Damn, since when did it become so easy for her to get so bothered at random? 

“Fine,” she said softly. Her lips pursed into a thin line. “It’s just that. I have a feeling I know where you’re going with this.”

A strange, high-pitched noise wheezed out of the emitter. Adi assumed that meant a sound of mild victory. 

“Promise you’ll keep an open mind? Good hell lords, you’re such a tight ass,” said Stass cheerily.

“I’m listening.”

“Good. You’ll want to lock the door to those quarters. And make sure you don’t have any upcoming commitments all the other officials will want you for. All your fancy General war business, y’know? So, I won’t lay everything out for you detail by detail, because, that would be kind of  _ weird,  _ but I can certainly offer suggestions.” 

Adi hung her chin to her collarbone. How the hell did this woman graduate from the academy? Stass was shameless as she said, “I wouldn’t recommend sitting in a chair. The bed is standard, of course, but going in the ‘fresher can be ten times more fun. Use your middle finger, or even the overhead attachment - but either way, the trick is to just  _ let go….” _

“ _ ‘Let go? _ ’ Kriff, Stass -”

“You told me you’d -”

“I’m no doubt expected for status reevaluation purposes soon, so I should really -”

“Do not abandon me mid-conversation like that!” Adi must’ve made a truly confounded face for Stass to be cackling so wickedly like that. “ _ Fine, _ Adi, you don’t have to take my advice.”

Adi’s whole face was flushed a deep crimson. It required a will infused with a brazen tolerance Adi wasn’t sure she had yet to sit back on her heels after scrambling forward to snatch the holoprojector.

“But you are a bit distressed, you’re right,” Stass resumed. “Plus, I happen to be connected with the Force, so I can tell that you’re obviously….pent up. It just might make you feel better.”

“Alright. Well, thanks, for that,” Adi said, a bit gruffly, and refrained from leveling a glare at Stass’s image. “But I should get going. Neyo will be trying to contact me.”

Stass did not take that as her cue to bid Adi farewell. “You said it was Master Plo Koon who rescued you and your forces, right?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I was just thinking about something.” The corners of Stass’s mouth were quirked very subtly into the expressive swells of her cheeks, and her eyes were ablaze like she was intent on burning a hole through the projection: never a positive sign, in Adi’s book. “He picked you up?”

“Yeah. It was Master Plo. Why?”

“Was he the one who personally rescued you? Like, was he at the door to your holding cell?”

“As a matter of fact, not technically,” Adi said hesitantly. Her eyes batted down to the mat, and she mindlessly swept a few white tendrils off her shoulder. She couldn’t decide if she should curse herself for not ending the transmission early, or Stass and her new chosen direction of conversation; which was somehow more disturbing to Adi than it had been before. 

“He sent a small squadron of troopers to complete that aspect of the engagement.”

“Mhm. And Master Plo, his second-in-command, isn’t that - ?”

“Commander Wolffe, yes,” Adi replied stiffly. “That’s his name. He retrieved me from the cell I was in onboard Grievous’s ship. And then,  _ moments _ later, we met up with Plo.”

Stass damn near howled. “I  _ knew _ it! Oh my gods, Adi, why didn’t you just say? Would’ve made my job  _ so _ much easier.”

“Will you stop with that?” Adi hissed, her voice unnecessarily hushed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s that Commander who’s throwing you all out of sorts, Adi,” Stass said, a touch smug. “It’s obvious. He was the one to release you from Grievous’s dump truck, and now you’re all -  _ bothered. _ I get it.”

“No, you don’t. I am  _ not - _ Stass. Commander Wolffe is a professional soldier whom I would never feel…. _ that way _ for, at all.” There was a suffocating pause; for Adi, at least. Then she added, “It’s like you don’t even know me.”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s all _my_ bad.” Stass bit her lip. “He’s handsome! And kind of like a mysterious badass, huh? With that eye? I bet he’s so _rough._ Come on, is he or is he not the one you told me -”

“Goodbye, Stass. I didn’t come to you for whatever this is, but, thanks for the advice anyway.” Adi was terse, sharp, stern. Her typical resort. “If a person could call it that.”

“You mean if a  _ Jedi _ could call it that,” Stass said, not as intense in her avidity, but unbothered nonetheless. “It’s not encouraged, but if you start to live a little, you’ll find all the Temple banthashit gets easier and easier to fake. Ooh, maybe if you pamper yourself up a bit you could catch him in a repairs closet or someth-”

“Fuck off.” Adi raised a clenched fist to her mouth and cleared her throat. “I mean, bye, Stass. I have to go.”

“Love you too! Tell me how it goes, Adi.”

The last thing Adi saw before she clicked the transmission off was Stass’s buoyant wink. She wasn’t sure how much more of bubbly energy and streams of inappropriate specifications she could handle. 

Commander Neyo commed her, a full minute later, and Adi was only grateful to get on her feet and lose herself to the rhythm of wading down the network of corridors. 

Adi’s intrusive thoughts were triggered at every corner on the cruiser, however. 

Every single trooper she passed, on maintenance duty or otherwise, angled straightened shoulders her way with a nod or salute. She felt discomfited by the obligation to acknowledge them with her own glance and head nod, and she’d never felt so small passing through a busy command station. Adi feared their eyes most of all, copious all around her and swollen with a dark tinted reminder of humanity. 

And most of all, she saw the stern features of Wolffe reflected in each of them. 

As disturbing as her fixation on the Commander was, Adi wasn’t one to poke at her internal musings until a cloud of sorrow hung over her head. Even so, she entered the main compound hall with the dampened presence of someone who’d discovered some mortifying truths rooted in their Order. 

The bridge center was located to the left of the hallway she was released onto off her most recent lift. And it was  _ bustling _ with activity. 

Two rows of holotables stretched down the main hall, each one swarmed by a large cluster of the clone trooper sea packed solid in the center. On top of that, a few broad steps led to stations secured up in the walls like circular caves, where similar clumps of troopers and officers hastened about.

Adi didn’t get affected by trivial fits of emotion, she was sure, so she signaled them all at ease and pretended like their simultaneous halt in toiling about to pay her attention wasn’t suddenly overwhelming. She also ignored her appreciation for how every single trooper decked in shiny white armor had a helmet secured over his head. 

She had a duty, an  _ obligation _ , to serve a cause more important and worthy than her realm of turmoils. There was never a fraction of a second to draw back from the present moment. That, Adi rolled over in her mind for the hundredth time that day, would be a moment of selfishness, of weakness. She was ashamed enough for comming her cousin. 

With all of that weighing apparently satisfyingly on her conscience, Adi strode over to where she caught sight of Commander Neyo amidst the commotion.

He was standing before the wall of an activated holochart, immersed in a datapad and definitely not wearing his helmet. Adi also knew he was aware of her presence - the background cry of  _ ‘General on deck’ _ was by protocol enough to jolt even the ARCs mulling about - but she let his neglect to seek her out himself slide. She wasn’t Master Windu, and Neyo had enough on his plate as it was. The role of Marshall Commander in the Grand Army lent him nearly as much responsibility as being a General did for her. 

“General Gallia,” he greeted her. Adi hoped Neyo wouldn’t sense her fierce trepidation as she stepped up to him. The handful of ARCs filling up space in the hall were much less proactive than everyone else, each devoid of their helmet as well, and tended to stick within a close proximity of their Commander. 

“Commander Neyo,” Adi replied. She folded her arms across her chest. “Will Master Plo be up here?”

“No, sir. General Koon had his own commitments to attend to.” Neyo’s fingers flitted intensely across the screen of the datapad, and his brow was furrowed as if his stomach ached. 

“Don’t tell me there are more transmissions coming through I need to answer.” 

Adi’s stare trained on the piece of maroon plastoid protruding off the Commander’s shoulder. There had to be only two junior officer troopers hanging at Neyo’s sides, but it may as well have been twenty as their unyielding stares drilled into her face. 

“Nothing from the Council and no enemy threats that we know of, sir,” Neyo said carefully. He glanced briefly at her. “ _ More _ of them, General?”

Adi shook her head. “It’s too complicated to explain.”

The pad of Neyo’s fingertip tapped one last time upon the device, before he twisted around and held it out to the shiny seated at a holochart desk console. The soldier accepted it without looking up from his wide display of flashing buttons and data screens. 

Neyo turned back to Adi, saying, “Not much time for stories anyway, General.” 

He stepped to the side and gestured for her to follow. She walked forward, grateful her direct line of eyesight was about as high as their breastplates as the ARC troopers jumped swiftly out of her way. 

Neyo laid a hand on her back while they maneuvered through a thick maze of bulky armor and sleek gray uniforms, urging her to match his brisk pace. There was a time when he wouldn’t have dared apply physical contact, even under his overworked circumstances, but the more booked Master Windu became for Temple duties, the more time Adi spent with the 91st corps. She and Neyo had surpassed the need to attain one another’s respect, and they were settled on a mutual understanding now. 

And yet, Adi had made the mistake of looking into his face before taking off down the hall. Her brain conjured up flashes of Wolffe, honing in particular on his slanted lips and the sweaty seam of his dark hairline, and began to associate those images with the gentle pressure against her layered tunic. Like it was Wolffe steering her up the few steps that led to one of the stations. 

That line of thought immediately alarmed Adi, a reaction she expected from herself anyways, but as of late any straying notions of Commander Wolffe seemed to suggest something….a little bit  _ not her speed. _

Neyo’s hand was gone the moment they spilled onto the platform, retaining the ability to move about freely. 

“Reinforcements are stretched thin,” Neyo began. “But that’s not news. What’s particularly  _ frustrating _ is that the head command outpost in the Quellor sector asked us a while ago to file some of our casualty numbers into their system.”

He directed Adi over to one of the consoles. She struck a rigid countenance for the duration of the time she’d push herself to take the brunt end of Neyo’s Marshall Commander provinces - and for the necessary instances of looking at a clone’s face. Adi swelled with renewed determination, shucking down her abrasive struggles for the sake of the overwhelmed office. 

“Are they being requested to deploy?”

“Sure.” Neyo shrugged. “We all are. But they happen to have a few advantages readily available in case they wanted to get away with withholding their forces.”

“How?”

“Because they refuse to manually submit their resources intake. It drives the Logistics Center on Coruscant nuts.”

“Is there an alternate transmission frequency near that sector?” Adi asked. The lighting here was dim to nonexistent, and Neyo’s face was ablaze with the flare of luminescence from the lively tech. 

“No,” he said. “Apparently, the Trade Federation is a huge precaution.”

Adi shrugged at that. “Well, the answer is absolutely not.”

“I know. I don’t think they were aware who they were asking.” A small smirk flicked up the corners of Neyo’s mouth. The trooper seated between their conversation chuckled audibly at that, simultaneously engrossed in his array of scanners. Neyo turned to the digitized block of stored records upon the console and Adi followed his gaze, placing a hand on the back of the trooper’s seat. 

Neyo’s finger jutted out to something. “Hey, bring that file up, will you?”

The trooper complied with a few clacks on his keyboard. A new datafile popped up on the screen, divided into minuscule sections streaming with compacted information. Adi and Neyo leaned in to examine the records, the 91st shiny in the middle.

Adi’s eyes began to squint as the chrono ticked. “What is this?”

Neyo exhaled a heavy groan. “Every single destroyed document and file we now have to forge and update before rendezvous, thanks to Grievous - by the way, did you finish those captive imparts?”

“Uh. Yes.”

“Great. We’ve still got primary  _ and _ secondary factions of our old cruiser’s database to sift through.”

Adi craned her neck to peer at Neyo over the top of the trooper’s helmet. “And what about Quellor?”

Neyo met her gaze with amusement pooled in his eyes. “You know me, General.”

She grinned at him. “That I do, Neyo.”

“Simple enough. I’m gonna bust their asses.” Neyo paused, and Adi had to bite the inside of her cheek as she felt the shiny implode with shock. His tone mildly eager, Neyo continued anyway, “Excuse my tongue, sir, but I figured if you finished with our rescue reports you might be interested in conducting the -”

“Of course I would be, Commander,” Adi said quickly. She knew this was her opportunity, if it wasn’t already too late. She had no right to kick back in her quarters, discussing personal matters with Stass while her men were strained for time with  _ this _ much work to complete. She needed to make up for that moment of oblivious distraction, a weak spot she was not keen on exploiting ever again. “But I will also oversee the complete resurgence of those lost datafiles.”

Neyo’s gloved fingers tapped in contemplation upon the console. “Sir, I’d rather you not burden yourself. I’ve got a handle on it.”

“I know that.” Adi hoped her indifference to his incumbent attitude was reflected in her expression. “And you’re going to accommodate my further services.”

“General, you are not obligated to -”

“Commander, I’m going to.” The clone trooper sitting at the console had spiked increasingly with adrenaline, caught in the crossfire of his superiors’ tension. “Let me, please.”

Neyo’s jaw clenched, but something like pity leaked into his steadfast gaze. “Of course. Do you have proceeding orders then, sir?”

Fatigue grew like a tumor from the back of Adi’s head, and it was hard to tell if a sickly twinge was pulsing in either her chest, or her stomach, but Adi hardly paid mind to the pertinent messages of her body. 

“Yes,” she said confidently. 

If Adi had unintentionally told Stass she’d been stressed before, then Grievous had infiltrated her cruiser for the sole sake of ensuring she put her credits where her mouth was. 

Fifteen standard minutes later, in the midst of Adi’s instigated chaos, a much too aggravated scoff for a Jedi left her mouth. She thrusted a ‘pad outwards. “Who was hardwiring File A-57?”

A trooper standing at the monitoring attachment of a holotable lifted a hand. “I was, sir.”

The crowd of preoccupied clones split instinctively as Adi marched forward. 

“What’s your name?” she demanded. 

“Er, Hoop, sir.”

“Hoop, what you submitted in no way correlates with Officer Dunk’s records of Report A-57.”

“Sorry, General. I was not aware of that.”

“Just fix it, please. I don’t have the time to go over it thoroughly. There are other asses I need to hound.”

He caught the ‘pad that was dropped upon his chest half a second later, and Adi was gone. 

Two Officers flanked her sides nearly the moment she was off walking again. 

“General Gallia.” The one on her left was already passing a holotablet in front of her.

Adi snatched it almost instantly. “What is it? I’m busy.”

“File A-39 is ready to be signed off, sir. However, I’m overseeing the operation of station Ten-Forty, and my troopers are having issues uploading their File records to the database system.”

Adi’s fingers mindlessly rapped across the device in her hands. “Oh, that’s wonderful. Where’s Ten-Forty?”

But the Officer had been guiding her between two holotables and towards the threshold of a station. Adi and the two Officers at her sides sprung up the broad steps.

“Which Files are we working with here?” she asked. 

“Files A-25 to 53, General,” said a trooper hunched over the foremost display of scanner screens. 

“You’ve already signed off on all of those, sir,” the Officer clarified. 

“We’re only authorized to submit them through this harddrive,” the trooper continued. He pointed to the digitized screen up in the wall, where an informative chart was spread out. “Otherwise they could be directed to any database other than our former cruiser’s, but -”

_ “- But _ it keeps informing us that there’s an error in the coordinates records,” finished another trooper seated one section of controls over. “Which is impossible. I’ve already run a cross-examination, and those coordinates are authentic and accurate.”

“We were even able to match them to previous conflicts with our enemies,” the Officer agreed. 

Adi glanced at him, and then looked between the two troopers, her stare pointed. There was a moment’s pause. She even let pass whoever brushed against her from behind on accident. 

“Is this a godsdamn  _ tech _ malfunction?” she growled. 

“No, sir,” the Officer chirped. “I’ve already tried contacting the Control Center Support team on Level B-32, and they spotted nothing. If you’d like, General, I could pull up the record of the transmission -”

“Who are you?”

“I - Officer Rint, sir.”

“Log in to your administrative site, Officer Rint.” Adi gestured impatiently to the console. “Go on.”

“Sir.” Officer Rint nudged the trooper aside and tapped something out on the keyboard. “There it is, General.”

“Okay, put in my authorization code to the proper harddrive before re-submitting that file.”

“Which is - ?”

“Four-two-one-nine.”

“Done, sir.”

Adi whipped around to the seated trooper. “Well?”

The faceplate of his helmet lifted from his assortment of controls to the datafiles pulled up on the large screen, fingers arched skillfully over his keyboard. “Submission complete, General. No errors.”

“Huh. Interesting.” Adi pressed the holotablet into Officer Rint’s hands. He accepted it without hesitation. “File A-39 is signed off, Officer. Are you having any more difficulties?”

“Absolutely not, General Gallia.”

Adi’s mouth rolled ahead of her overcooked brain when her gaze latched onto the standing trooper. 

“Hey - are you currently applying records to any one file, trooper?” she asked him.

The upper-half of his cuirass was twisted to face her, but his left shoulder swooped low in order to work one hand of fingers over his console. “No, sir. I’ve got a line up of other completed files that are now able to pass through the harddrive.”

“Yeah. What’s your name?”

The trooper stilled. “Um. My CT number is five-one-eight -”

“I said your  _ name,” _ Adi repeated, her voice rising in volume. She felt so out of body; her frustration poured out of her like steam flowing over the surface of boiling water. “Did I ask for a  _ number, _ no, I didn’t. I wanted a name with  _ letters, _ you got that?”

Ten-Forty froze, lapsing into silence. There were a few seconds of no noticeable motion in the station. The minute Adi tapped into the fact that Ten-Forty’s energy in the Force was sizzled to its peak with nerves, an impediment to working caused by  _ her, _ she was suddenly incited to full-on rage. 

Adi spun to face out from Ten-Forty, bellowing into the compound: “When I say  _ ‘name,’ _ I am  _ not _ asking for your fucking number!”

A chorus of ‘Yes, General’ rang throughout the hall. 

“Great,” Adi spat, whirling back to the monitoring screens. 

She was desperate to spur herself on, to delve into the next presented issue concerning these damn Files and Reports; that trooper apologized, but Adi hardly noticed. The 91st corps workplace was qualified to make the subconscious inference that General Gallia couldn’t give any amount of  _ osik _ about the manner in which they replied to her. 

Adi turned to face the Officer she hadn’t tended to yet, who was still stuck to her right side. 

“What do you want?” she snapped. 

“My station needed to confirm some records, General.”

Adi’s gut churned at the prospect. “Another authorization code?”

“Exactly, sir.”

“I was literally  _ just _ matching all the Files to their corresponding Reports - my tedious work is  _ downgrading _ now?”

Adi was incredulous. She had lost sleep over her guise from the point of view of her men; in a normal state of mind, she would render her current behavior worthy of the ignominious status. 

“Who the hell else needs me for administrative access?”

“There are certainly more officials,” the meddling officer said. “But….I’m sure they may need you for different purposes too.”

“How many others?”

“Well, uh, I know there’s currently a line….”

Adi sidestepped across Ten-Forty’s platform to gaze down the row of stations along the wall. They were each conducted by a clone officer, all of whom were discernible upon his platform, whose eyes immediately swiveled away from the turn of Adi’s head. 

She scowled horrendously. “ _ Fuck.  _ Fuck all of this.”

Adi slid a hand down the side of her face, rubbing the heel of her palm into the scalp of her headdress. It became increasingly obvious her mental capacity for this swamping kind of stress was malnourished - she didn’t know for what kriffing reason. 

But it was unacceptable, and her instincts propelled her against a current of bitter temperament. “Where the hell is Commander Neyo?”

“Over here, General."

Adi fled down the steps, once again neglecting that Officer.

She’d caught Neyo striding about the center a few times after they’d agreed to split the workload, but now he was once again holed up in the main compound office, working over the contents of a holotablet. 

“There is  _ no _ sense of direction out there, Neyo,” Adi said tightly as soon as she reached him, her breath caught on the border of hysterics. “Um. How’s it going for you so far?”

“Could be worse, looking on the brightside,” he said, and spared her an empathetic glance. Admittedly, he didn’t sound too poised, and the shifting of his back teeth didn’t shadow that front, either. “I almost always manage when the center gets this hectic, though, General, so not to worry.”

A distrust in her current state of mind pitted within her uncomfortably. Those same ARC troopers were hanging at Neyo’s sides again, and yet even their looming figures couldn’t prevent Adi’s anxieties from transpiring through her mouth.

“I just went off on that kriffing shiny, only doing his best….”

“Don’t think about it,” Neyo told her. He clipped the ‘tablet to his belt and shuffled forward on his feet. “I do it all the time.”

If anyone could’ve reassured her, it would have been him, but Adi was wrapped too tightly under a blanket of shame to heed his standardized comfort. They walked out of the station and down into the hustling muddle. 

“I’ve had to supervise several deep dives into the system for research purposes,” Neyo said. “Otherwise, they’d have to conduct a procedural project. I wasn’t gonna deal with that.”

They approached a holotable with a ‘chart protruding from its middle. 

“Does the Republic  _ need _ datafiles from a destroyed cruiser? I don’t see the point in restoring them,” Adi mused bitterly. She watched as Neyo leaned across the holotable, snatched a cord out of the hands of a trooper, and plugged its connector into his ‘tablet’s port. 

“It’s the Senatorial Complex that wants the records,” Neyo huffed. He turned to meet her gaze. “My bloodstream’s flooded with whatever they put in stimpacks, I promise you. I might’ve told Six-Four over there I took three more than I actually did, but the effect’s all the same.”

Adi stifled a weak laugh. His meaning was inescapable. She was also overcome by a flush and an irrelevant reminder of the clone that had been plaguing her mind as of late, thanks to the innocent, warm smile Neyo was offering her. 

His blatant intention to gain authority over the whole center was beginning to sway her, too; the notion of her private quarters far outweighed commanding clone officers for the next few hours, and Adi let that possibility invade her conscience like it was a soothing hot bath. 

The hydraulic announcement of the main hall entrance was what ruptured Adi’s descent into submission. 

“What was that?” Adi rose up on her toes to catch a glimpse down the center hall, but it was a futile effort with the holochart displayed before her. 

“Whoever it is, they better have a damn good reason for coming in here,” Neyo retorted. 

The intruders seemed to cause a negative disturbance as they made their way through the compound. They were clones, Adi could gather that much, but the 91st troopers and bridge officers cluttered around the hallway of holotables grew threaded with the seeds of vexation in the Force. 

As the uninvited brothers sidled over to where the General and Commander stood, Adi noticed grunts of complaint and faltering in work even within the stations up in the walls. 

Her view still obstructed, Adi quickly circled the ‘table to stand beside the trooper who’d been compelled to adjust his hardwiring routine after Neyo took that cord from him. She hadn’t missed his scoff as the padding of booted feet strode up. 

Adi caught sight of a small squad, gray paint swirling over their armor and all in a world of their own. But they certainly weren’t what made Adi’s heart race until it nearly shattered her ribcage. 

It was their Commander, who stood at the front of the pack like he was basking in whopping post-spar praise.

Oh,  _ fuck.  _

She was transfixed on the spot. The prospect of that break she’d almost succumbed to melted away into unsustainable mush in her mind, and was replaced by a flurry of outrageous disbelief. 

Wolffe’s presence invaded her senses as badly as if she were on the lookout for her assassin. All the same….she just stood there, staring, utterly unsure of what to do. 

Adi was alerted to Neyo barging onto the scene by the clatter of his ‘tablet hitting his thigh plate. 

“Wolfpack squad, oh fuck me,” he muttered. 

There were millions upon millions of these same men outside of this room, all genetically identical and featured with the same enhancements, yet it had been Wolffe who’d lent Adi an edge of personification in her restricted path of perspective. 

His eyes, one a creamy golden brown and the other cloudy with cybernetics, were close to landing on hers,  _ almost _ ….but she and him missed their fraction of a second to share a knowing, secretive exchange before the environment required their attentiveness.

“Commander, do you need something?” Neyo asked firmly. Adi cast a side glance his way. She wondered if she’d have ever applied the humanized aspect to the way Neyo’s own honey flecked eyes scrunched at the corners when he got frustrated. 

But Wolffe began to say something, and her attention was diverted. 

“Boys and I were just stopping by,” he said, jerking his head to the troopers hanging behind him. “The 91st departs at next rendezvous, right? I’ve learned better than to wait for the convenience of Coruscant.”

His voice was gruff and imposing. Nothing at all like what Adi had grown accustomed to out of a regular trooper’s mouth. It sent an unexplainable rush through her body.

“Yes, life’s just too short, isn’t it?” Neyo said. “Well, unfortunately, our time is  _ so _ pressed we can only accommodate those with something to professionally contribute.”

If any of the nearby ‘tables assumed they were discreet in prioritizing watching Neyo confront Wolfpack over their designated hardwiring, they were horribly mistaken. 

“I’d never impede on a bridge center with unprofessional intentions, sir,” Wolffe said. A brazen demeanor was outlined in his posture, as if the attention of the room added a complementary flourish to his act. “I’m a man who knows no rest myself, actually.”

“Great. So you’ll understand why I don’t want you  _ impeding _ in here at all,” Neyo scolded. “I’m running a tight schedule. And frankly, I don’t see you being of much help.”

The troopers of the 91st nudged one another and examined the group in the middle of the hall with a bristling kind of curiosity, and Adi could sense they hoped for some kind of brawl. She wondered if the hunger for the kind of thrill marked along the brutality spectrum was a natural product of being infixed with the graces of a soldier. But Adi didn’t blame them, in this case; she’d give nearly anything to get out of conducting their current work. 

“That’s merely presumptuous, sir,” Wolffe said, and his fingers even flexed outwards with the threat of lifting his palms. “If you’d like, Wolfpack and I can stand out of your way.”

It hit Adi that disrespecting a Marshal Commander was completely out of character for Wolffe. 

“No, thanks, Commander,” Neyo said curtly, his voice rising in volume.  _ Finally, _ Adi tore her gaze from the configuration of Wolffe’s stature to the face of her pissed off Commander. “You can leave to get out of our way.”

Using her mental power to suppress newfound, uncontrollable thoughts regarding her inspection of Wolffe was Adi’s excuse for preoccupation. She was on the brink, though to her appreciation not as badly as Neyo was, to losing her equanimity when one of Wolffe’s minions opened his mouth.

“Commander Neyo, sir, it’s really no problem,” he said. This trooper had a thin layer of silver hair over his head and a broad, stupid grin on his face. Adi knew she wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of the look Neyo was no doubt giving him. “We never cause trouble where we don’t belong.” 

Another one, to Wolffe’s left this time, piped up next. “Think of us as the maintenance droids on standby in case  _ osik _ hits the propellers.”

Silver hair nodded in affirmation. “What he said.” 

Wolffe was rather late to acknowledge their unwonted interruption. “Cut it out. Does it kill you two to keep your mouths shut?” 

He had the deceptive skill of switching on a facade of sincerity. It dissolved as he said, “Anyways, is there a caf station in here?”

“A  _ caf _ \- Wolffe. Seriously,” Neyo deadpanned. He paced in front of Adi with the rathe of a man whose temper ran on a limited time frame. “Your squad’s distracting my men, and I still have no idea what you’re doing here.” 

Neyo began to mess with the screens spread over the console, his back turned to Wolfpack. 

“All the more reason keep me around, huh, sir?” Wolffe drawled. “We’re the surprise element that’s clearly lacking in this workplace.”

Adi watched, her fingers curling awkwardly at her hip, as Neyo paused in his progress, exhaling a dangerous flow of air. 

“The 91st can meet you in the mess in a standard  _ half hour. _ Whatever it is you need, just so you can get the hell out.” Neyo turned back around to look at Wolfpack. “Not a soul in this room wants you around right now, so beat it, Commander. I’m not asking again.” 

This time, Wolffe did flash his palms. “My apologies, sir. You know it’s never my intention to offend.” 

Whether it was an accident or not, an eavesdropper whispered in mocking jest to a brother loud enough for the tense group to hear:  _ “His reputation certainly precedes him….” _

Wolffe started. “Who said-”

“Hey,” Neyo barked at the voice. “Quiet. Back to work.”

A sly smirk then slid across Wolffe’s face. “Anyways, Commander Neyo….I’m not sure we’re entirely unwelcome.”

The whizzing of her brain, the rapid anticipation of her heartbeat, quickly halted dead when Wolffe’s gaze settled on Adi’s. 

He nodded. “General Gallia.” 

“Commander Wolffe,” she addressed on instinct. 

Now that she’d been drawn into the conflict, Adi was appalled to note she hadn’t spoken up yet. Not one word had uttered from her mouth, while Neyo was stuck in infantile banter. She realized that he, too, had laid his flinty stare on her. 

This time, it was full of wary apprehension. As if the root to his dread had just been exploited. 

Meeting Wolffe’s eyes again, Adi felt that a similar expectancy had flooded the room. 

Oh, hells no. 

She would not have such presumptions serve as the irrevocable film that masked her image. 

Neyo’s desperation for Wolfpack’s departure became clear to her in a wave of humiliation. But so did the reason for Wolffe’s arrival. 

In that moment, another audible snippet of gossip circulated through the troopers and floated into Adi’s subconscious like a bad dream,  _ “He’s just here for the General….” _

And Adi’s mind was made up. 

She hoped she chewed up a formidable impression of determination as she turned to Neyo. “There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done.” 

His brows lifted. “You could say that again.” 

Without so much as casting a glance in Wolffe’s direction, Adi rotated abruptly on her heels and marched back down the hall, past the main bridge center station and to where she’d been relaying the primary orders. 

“Everyone focus on their tasks,” she bellowed. “No one pay mind to the Hundred and fourth.”

“Hey, General, wait -”

But Adi consciously muffled whatever overture Wolffe wanted to advance her way. 

“Who needs my authorization code?” Adi asked her side of the center. 

Most pairs of eyes either bucketed or unbucketed were already glued to her, but she instantaneously gained more urgent attention. 

At the first desperate Officer she spotted, standing on a platform with a datapad in each hand, Adi made for his monitoring station and quickly pattered up the steps. She only jerked back around when a rustle of movement flurried from directly behind her.

Wolffe was a few paces down the steps, looking almost surprised to be standing in one piece; Neyo was pulling his arms back down to his sides with effort, the flare of his nostrils furnishing a flush at the fact that his counterpart slipped from his restraint. 

Adi studied the scene before rounding on Wolffe. “Did you just resist arrest from my Commander?”

“No.”

“Yes.”

An incredulous look sprouted upon Wolffe’s face as he glanced between the General and Commander. His mock behavior was beginning to irk Adi. Neyo just rolled his eyes. 

“He wasn’t arresting me, what the -”

“Neyo, why’s he still here?” Adi spat. 

“You didn’t intervene, sir,” Neyo replied, shrugging. “You didn’t clarify a course of action.” He shot a scathing look to the back of Wolffe’s head. “I  _ am _ trying to get rid of them, though.”

The goal was to be productive, to persevere against her murky mood and help out her men, no matter that they were engineered to withstand more strenuous circumstances than this. The point was to embody the selfless ideals of the Jedi, a seemingly unreasonable standard that Adi had always been so good at attaining. She’d never before struggled with her Order’s logic, or encountered many mental barriers to her progress inhibiting the Force. 

And yet, observing a man who was clearly willing to break a few procedural formalities just to secure himself within her vicinity - Adi found the sturdy institution in her head crumbling into incomprehension. 

“You want to stay? Fine,” Adi finally told Wolffe. “But leave my men alone.” 

She flitted around to find that officer, disinterested in the wordless exchange Neyo and Wolffe were no doubt engaging in. She distantly heard footsteps thud back down the station steps, anyway. 

“Name?” Adi asked, gazing up at the scanners while extending a hand. 

A datapad was slapped in it. 

“Officer Zoli, sir,” a body somewhere in her peripheral vision responded formally. “I’m head of station Nine-Fifteen, General, running through Files A-97 to 123.”

Adi sidled over to the back of a console seat, occupied by a trooper, and leaned against it while trying hard to immerse herself within the ‘pad. The officer stayed near her. 

“Is there a percentage on the completion?” Adi’s one hand started to click up a storm.

“As of right now, there’s a fifty-nine percent completion rate, sir.”

“Has a formatting check been arranged?”

“That drops to about a forty-three percent rate.”

Fluorescent light sprayed Adi’s face as she stared unblinking at the screen. “Uh-huh. And my code is required after I sign off on all of these?”

“Yes, sir. If, um….” the Officer trailed off awkwardly. Adi lifted her head. 

He continued, “If you’re okay with -”

“Oh, yeah. ‘S fine.” Adi waved a dismissive hand at him and looked back down to the stream of files. 

Her concentration lagged terribly. It was mainly her vexation at her unacceptable working pace that drew her from the trance of the ‘pad’s data long enough to see a tall bulk of plastoid in the edges of her vision.

Wolffe was there, hanging shamelessly at her side, of course. 

“Commander,” Adi growled, ducking her chin to avoid looking at him. Her heart began to unfairly pulse like a siren beneath her skin. “Shouldn’t you be keeping your troopers from running loose around my center?”

“Commander Neyo’s ARCs are doing that for me, I believe,” Wolffe replied, like it was the last thing that would keep him pacing the barracks at night. “The real question is who let  _ those _ friendly gentlemen in your center. Isn’t that a safety hazard?”

“Having a caf station located in an operating bridge compound is  _ way _ more of a safety hazard, if you ask me,” Adi murmured. She was a fraction away from closing every last file on the datapad. 

“So there  _ is _ one in here? I knew it.” Something like relief spilled into the undertones of Wolffe’s typically colorless voice. It was a reaction Adi found quite….amusing.

But those kinds of feelings were  _ distracting. _ Unnecessarily distracting, when she was trying to nurture a more noble comportment than that of letting Neyo drown in the administrative side of the war. 

Wolffe paused for only a moment. “Do you want me to get you a cup?”

She needed to put distance between them. And keep her hands as full as possible. 

Fucking finally, the very last file was rendered complete by a blinking green icon. Adi clutched the ‘pad in both hands like she’d won a trophy and threw a piercing look up at Wolffe. 

“I’m busy,” she reiterated carefully. 

She hoped her eyes conveyed a steadfast message of her sincerity. But as she pushed past Wolffe, she was adamant to ignore the fact that all she’d succeeded in doing was drink in the sight of his full, tantalizing lips. 

Nine-Fifteen’s officer stood a ways across the room. When Adi reached him, he accepted the device she handed to him like it was the first packet of rations he’d seen in a week. 

“Thank you, General -”

“Who’s running the submissions?”

The Officer didn’t falter as he directed Adi down the station’s loop of a console, to where a trooper stood between two seated 91st men. All three of them were making vigorous work of their keyboards. 

Adi’s eyes latched back onto the datapad clamped in the officer’s hands. “Will I need that? Someone was saying the files’ uploading process was taking its sweet-ass time….”

The Officer took a moment too long to understand Adi’s meaning. “We haven’t experienced any delays submitting our files yet, sir, but if you’d prefer to use the direct source you can. It wouldn’t hurt.”

He’d given her the datapad before he finished speaking. Adi itched to apply the same stamina she embodied during a battle engagement to the center’s satisfactory fulfillment of its duties. But what she considered to be a rampant streak of aptness ceased when she honed into the Officer. 

“Who do I bring this to?” Adi paused. “Officer, er…. _ Zoli.” _

Adi knew she was tiny. So it stood out when Zoli had to blink back down to her from something a bit more his height. 

“Uh - him,” Officer Zoli said, and gestured to the chair to the harddrive operator’s right. 

Adi didn’t budge. Officer Zoli caught her withering stare uncomfortably, and looked as if he wanted to shrink into the depths of armor plates he wasn’t clobbered in. 

“Is he reliable enough?”

“That’s what he’s trained for, General.” Zoli’s nose scrunched at something.

“Are you  _ sure _ you recommend using the datapad?”

“Ye- um, sir?”

“Commander Wolffe’s behind me, isn’t he?”

Zoli missed his chance to respond before Adi was twisting around and bit out as levelheaded as she could, “Really, you again? What did I just tell you?”

Adi couldn’t tell what it was on his face; did he think he was  _ taunting _ her, like there was some kind of hidden knowledge he was maliciously intent on holding over her? Whatever stupid thing it was, Wolffe’s countenance was etched with a subtle emphasis. 

“I’ve been as inconspicuous as an ancient Lothal spirit, General,” he said. 

Adi’s lips pursed. “You’re welcome to leave at any time, Commander.”

Wolffe was rousing contempt within Nine-Fifteen the closer he kept to Adi's heels; no one wanted the second in command of the 104th battalion sidetracking their General. 

Adi instantly abandoned the confrontation and headed to the trooper seated beside the harddrive operator. She dismissed Officer Zoli as she passed him, and he let a covert look linger in Wolffe’s direction before departing from the scene. 

But Wolffe wasn’t fazed by the acrimony stirring throughout the 91st work area like a tenuous mist. 

“Here you are,” Adi told the shiny, and he readily took the ‘pad without glancing her way. 

Heading back, Adi swerved around Wolffe to squeeze in between the seat on the left side and the trooper curved over his console display. 

It was a tight fit for any clone, but Adi’s petite frame managed to slide in; the movement momentarily startled the troopers on either side of her, but it was nothing to officially divert them.

What  _ did, _ however, was when Wolffe pressed in, slinging his elbow atop the back of the chair and bodily blocking Adi’s exit from her confined space. 

She didn’t prefer to be embarrassed over this new inadvertent alignment. Adi  _ had _ given Wolffe the chance to manipulate the positioning, regardless, and the last thing she wanted was for her troopers to undergo the uncomfortable repercussions of her mistakes. 

A voice close enough to crawl up her headdress rumbled up, “But my retreat from the area isn’t mandatory, is it?”

The Force was not kind to her. Turning with an exterior of austere authority, Adi was thrown by what she was met with in Wolffe’s gaze. Even if she hadn’t been able to read into the subtext written all over Wolffe on a more tangible level, the slant from his broad chest to his hips as well as the definition in his jaw would  _ still _ send the flustered ripple through her that it did. 

“Don’t think I’ll be any more flexible for you than I already have been.”

The way the corners of Wolffe’s mouth drew up was beguiling. “Oh, I’m sure you will be.”

A boiling eruption in the force that sloped around Adi from all sides signified the other three men growing disconcerted. Somehow, the contrast in dispositions was made worse by the tight proximity. 

The hell had Wolffe meant by that, anyway? 

Adi decided to ignore him, as she should have done from the start. The circle of tendrils hanging around her shoulders swished as she looked to the activity upon the screen, and a few of them knocked against the back of the operator’s cuirass. 

“Who is that?” Adi muttered to him. She inclined her head to the seated trooper she’d handed the datapad to, and her forehead almost bumped into his arm plate. She was standing right up against him, so close that when she talked her breath bounced off his shiny white armor. 

The trooper kept his faceplate pinned to the digitized screen, and Adi could tell he was trying not to shuffle on his feet. 

“Three-Eight, I believe, sir,” he mumbled back. 

“His name?”

“No idea.”

Adi grunted and tried to lean past the operator shiny. Her movement only caused a tingling sensation to attack her spine, a blatant sign of the pair of eyes Wolffe had roaming all over her. 

“Hey, Three-Eight?” she said tentatively. 

“Yes sir?”

“Are we, um. Ready to launch?”

“Momentarily, General.”

Not exactly the answer Adi wanted to hear. But she refused to take her fussings out on any of these shinies. 

“You know,  _ technically, _ this playground work defaults to under the second in command’s jurisdiction.”

“Right, like I didn’t  _ know _ \- I - ugh.” Adi shut her eyes for a moment to ground herself. “Well, it happens to be under mine for the time being, Wolffe. So I’d suggest you clean up your act.”

“I pass anything that isn’t my firsthand priority down to Sinker every chance I get. Why wouldn’t you….y’know, try and get out of here?”

Adi wanted to tell him she owed it to her men to pull her weight, but the congruous judgement strung throughout the others dried her tongue and left a bad taste in her mouth. 

“The General’s in charge no matter what,” the operator shiny reproached, in place of Adi’s delayed reply. “Maybe Sergeant Sinker would receive some proficient results in his evaluative work for once if you took some initiative.”

There was a moment’s pause in which the trooper flooded with hot embarrassment. Beneath his tough layer of daring, Wolffe was certainly gleeful at the aberrant comment. Adi had to restrain a selfish fire that crackled to life and pushed her to defend Wolffe - it wasn’t like he needed to be defended, or even  _ deserved _ it, and she was supposed to be on her troopers’ side anyway - but she quickly offered him the attention of her pointed look to stifle whatever the stupid commander had to say. 

Since the trooper was shucked through with pronounced anxiety, there was no need to take anything more from an expression, but it was still strange to reprimand someone when the anticipation of emotional featuristics was squashed. 

“My apologies, General Gallia, I - I really didn’t mean -”

“And who are you?” Adi asked. 

“Gen- er, I’m Five-Seven, sir.”

Wolffe snorted. “And General Gallia’s about 5’3” herself.”

Three-Eight signalled that the download was complete right as Adi swatted a hand at Wolffe, demanding his silence. She tried to acknowledge Three-Eight, gripping the edge of the console, but Five-Seven stretched an arm across it at the same time and they fumbled against one another. 

Adi recoiled as discreetly as she could in her limited space. Her face blitzed with heat after the unintentional physical contact. Whether the reaction was from her  _ breath _ or Wolffe’s wandering gaze, she wasn’t going to think too hard on it. 

“Sir, what’s your authorization code?” Five-Seven requested tightly. 

Rocking onto her toes, Adi became aware the backs of her thighs had been squashed against the edge of the third trooper’s chair. “I can put it into the system, don’t worry about it.”

But Five-Seven didn’t seem satisfied with that. His fingers remained steadfast above the keyboard. Adi bent over the console to type the numbers out herself, and was compelled to bat his hands away.

_ Four, two _ ….Adi felt her only advantage in this _ particular position  _ was that no one could see her face, as cramped together as they all were. She cursed under her breath when she had to type in her code a second time. 

“Seeing as you’re enforcing no obligation of mine to leave, I take it I’m free to linger in whichever location I see fit?” Wolffe said. Under a coat of smug entitlement, Adi found the tint in his tone that correlated with where he glued his line of sight.

“Lingering where you know how badly the others are repulsed by your presence isn’t very noble, is it?” Adi rambled. It was times like these when Adi wished she could shut the Force off completely. She didn’t have to see him to know that Wolffe was being intentionally obvious in his….visual analysis of her. 

The heat that had been in her face slithered down to the core of her stomach the longer she stayed bent at almost a ninety degree angle. 

Wolffe’s next inquiry came out a bit softer. “Do you remember the last conversation we had?”

“ _ Shit, _ ” Adi spluttered accidentally. Four, two, one….the fuck was the last number? “What are you trying to say to me?”

“I was wondering if my past excursions with a Jedi General are worthy enough for her to remember them,” Wolffe said. 

Adi tensed, self-conscious of the wildly straying thoughts coursing within the shinies. “What? We’ve never engaged in  _ excursions. _ Unless you mean my rescue from Grievous’s ship, then I suppose that counts.”

The grin was obvious in Wolffe’s voice. “I meant  _ conversations _ by excursions, General. No physical engagements have occurred with the two us….against the enemy, of course.”

Adi’s teeth found the mush of her cheek to bite to hold back a scoff. Feigning innocence on her part was just as mandatory as it was for her men.

She’d never before been so easily disquieted by unfiltered protuberances from someone’s signature, and Wolffe’s obnoxious crudity shouldn’t be any different. 

Adi had that route of justification, at least; she shouldn’t  _ have _ to officially dismiss him from the center, because she was more than qualified to withstand any form of obstacle, including him. 

“You’ve got it in, General,” Five-Seven said from above her, interrupting the chaos in her brain. 

Adi blinked at the keyboard, mere inches from her face, before quickly retracting to her full height. Her elbow accidentally scraped along Five-Seven’s stomach as she stood. 

“Right.” Considering the imbalanced whirlwind she’d been stirring throughout the center, Adi was taken aback by her minimalistic degree of embarrassment. 

At the heart of the situation, she was making a fool of herself. Yet, even as Five-Seven closed in on the console as soon as she was out of the way, and her backside crashed into the armrest of that other trooper’s seat, it was a slow process of giving in. 

“It was actually about your favorite garden hotspot in the Jedi Temple,” Wolffe recalled. 

Adi zoned out from her attempt at focusing on the submission of Nine-Fifteen’s assigned files, and instead allowed for Wolffe’s voice to consume her attention. 

Her fingers drummed thoughtfully on the console. “Hm. I forgot I mentioned that.”

“It had sounded like a very personal thing,” Wolffe said. 

A smile strained the muscles on Adi’s face. “Like you’d know. Don’t get too ahead of yourself.”

Wolffe emitted a sample of his full laugh; a pattern of low, hearty sounds that broiled a whole new warmth within Adi. “Yeah, right. I’m sorry, General, Commander Neyo heard all about it too, didn’t he?”

By Adi’s own standards, her following giggle encompassed disparity with the Order’s values. “Stop teasing him. Neyo has more productive things to discuss with me.”

It occurred to her that she was speaking with someone who she couldn’t see. Eye contact was one of those universal essentials to social behavior that force-users had the ability to overlook in their own interactions. 

But Wolffe didn’t possess the force, and Adi’s sudden embarrassment sprung from what she labelled as disconsideration of him rather than from the aggravation swelling within the troopers. 

“I haven’t been alive very long, sir,” Wolffe began, “but I happen to have noticed that the intimate details of a person’s life serve for much more interesting conversation than war.”

Adi liked his answer when she shouldn’t have. She was mentally constructing a response, while simultaneously planning how to strategically turn around to face him, when the trooper whose faceplate was close enough to rub into her hip spoke out -

“The  _ war _ is what’s more relevant to this stupid file submission than the conversation you two are trying to have,” he grumbled.

Adi wasn’t proud that these shinies felt the way they did. But she also wasn’t upset.

“Was that necessary?” Five-Seven chided. 

“He’s fine,” Adi sighed. 

“He actually sounded pretty sickly to me,” Wolffe said, devoid of venom. “I can file an indisposed account for you, General Gallia.”

“Are you going to pass out the General’s authorization code for her, too?” Three-Eight droned from his seat. “There are plenty of stations who need it. Or - wait, no, Commander Wolffe is the distraction.”

Adi didn’t want to risk brushing against Five-Seven by trying to shoot Three-Eight a stern look. Five-Seven turned out to be an impressive multi-tasker as he turned to the other shiny in her place. 

“Out of line, trooper,” Five-Seven reprimanded half-heartedly. Adi couldn’t bring herself to expect anything more. 

She inclined her mouth somewhere near the bubble of space his helmet took up. “Am I needed any longer in Nine-Fifteen?” 

Adi couldn’t tell if Five-Seven’s breath hitched under his modulator due to relief or concern. “You...are not, sir, no.”

Adi took that like it was permission. 

She backed out of the little pocket of space, her thigh skidding against that shiny’s chair and her shoulder skimming Five-Seven’s armor. 

It was Wolffe’s body that blocked her way out, and when she looked at him with the mute command to step aside, she was met with a soft smirk of comfortability, like he’d been waiting for her company and was willing to wait a little longer if needed. 

He did move for her, though, not that Adi would have minded if he’d decided to tease her a bit. The roots of her irritability with him were mostly eradicated, but the most prominent one now was what was suddenly before her: even  _ more _ troopers, busy at work as they strode throughout the station, and each with the incentive to spy on their General and the 104th’s Commander, wrapped up in each other like it was a Life Day party. 

Adi settled against the back of the unnamed trooper’s seat, folding her arms across her chest. 

“Trust me when I say they’d all rather be in your place,” Wolffe then spoke, indicating to the shinies in the station. He walked around to the right side of her, closing in once more. 

“All the more reason for me to help out,” Adi exhaled in defeat. 

Wolffe shrugged. “They don’t care who’s in charge and who’s not. It’s all the same.”

“But I’m  _ right here. _ Physically. How would you feel if you had a large project to complete and Master Plo just sat around, sipping caf? I know him, he would never do that.”

“Maybe not. But I know I’d just nod at him and be like, ‘I understand, sir. A break you well deserve.’”

Wolffe’s grin was contagious, and Adi chuckled. “In this case, you’ve been purposefully trying to distract me. I don’t appreciate that,” she noted. 

Between the lack of malice in her tone and the arm Wolffe raised to rest somewhere above her head, it was clear they’d each made their deviant choice. 

“I’d appreciate anyone who gave me an opportunity to talk informally,” Wolffe replied. “Especially with your alternative. But that’s just me.”

“That’s what you’re here for? To speak informally with me?” 

Adi wasn’t sure why she said that, but the prolonged gaze that held between them like a standoff strengthened her reason to remain glued against the back of the chair. 

“I guess I did insinuate that,” Wolffe said thoughtfully, and left it at that. “But you’re the one with the special ability to tell  _ me _ what my intentions are.”

“Now  _ that _ is quite the misconception,” Adi laughed. “I’m able to make pointless assumptions about people just like any of….just like how you do it, too.”

“There’s nothing that gets on my nerves more than when people tell me what I think,” Wolffe grimaced. “Like they’re reading my mind, or something. People will get such a sense of….entitlement, for no reason. I think it’s such a shallow way to go about life.”

It wasn’t everyday that a Jedi General explicitly heard the subjective perception of any one of their soldiers, beyond the outermost layer the force could touch upon. Adi embraced whatever tender empathy that poured out from within her and considerably softened her facial demeanor.

“It’s….difficult to deal with your frustration at times, especially when the anger’s directed at someone else,” Adi said slowly, but there was no substance behind her words. For the third or fourth time, she felt as if the fragments of Temple preachings that were tossed into conversation were almost counterproductive. 

She wanted to apologize - for what, she didn’t exactly know - but Wolffe beat her to the punch. 

“I’m sorry if that was kind of harsh,” Wolffe said, although there was no strength imbued in his voice. 

“No, it wasn’t. Not at all.” 

If Wolffe had believed Adi was patronizing him with objective wisdom as she feared, then he ignored it to strike at the heart of what he  _ really _ wanted to discuss with her. 

“I bet that garden of yours takes those trivial opinions right out of your head,” he said. 

Adi shook her head. “They’re not trivial. They’re  _ normal. _ Not having them would indicate something was wrong. I…think.” She cleared her throat as a passing trooper faltered on the picture of her and Wolffe, a bit too conspicuously, before carrying on. Adi continued, “And the garden is more like a medium for your thoughts. You still have to do the work yourself.”

“Ah. Gotcha.”

“I really had forgotten I told you about it, though.”

Wolffe took a moment to run his eyes up and down the small length of her figure. “You also didn’t finish telling me about it.”

Adi’s back wiggled against the chair like she wouldn’t mind melding into the metal. Stass was right. There was something purely enticing about Wolffe’s cybernetic eye, foggy with streaks of grey and looking at her like it wanted to see more. 

“What do you still want to know?” Adi croaked. 

“It sounded like a source of...passion, to you. I wanna know if I’d enjoy it.” Adi waited, but Wolffe appeared entirely seriously. She quirked her brows as if to query if he wanted an authentic answer. 

“If I wasn’t a Jedi I don’t think I’d find much appeal to it,” Adi settled on. She shrugged. “But anyone would like it if they needed it.”

“What’s it like?” he asked. 

Adi’s chin dipped to her collarbone so she could watch her thumbs twiddle, to resist the temptation of sliding closer to the spot under Wolffe’s propped-up arm. Her mind conjured images of her favorite “garden hotspot,” as Wolffe had put it. 

The temple had a labyrinth of centuries-old grounds for healing and soul searching. Sometimes these caverns defied the architectural configuration, and as far as Adi knew every Jedi Master had a favorite. Hers, nicknamed  _ Lush Ambience, _ was a magnificent garden where most of her dire grievances have been mediated over. 

“Well. To tell you the truth,” Adi said, a smile sprouting on her face. “It’s so peaceful. And very beautiful. It completely takes you away from everything you’ve ever known in the physical world, and brings you straight to the spiritual one.”

Just thinking about the purifying energy that had sizzled through the greenery, before it penetrated beneath the layers of her consciousness as her bare feet dug into the soil, was nearly enough to put Adi in a relaxed state. 

“There’s this tiny spring I really love,” she resumed. “It runs down from this patch of bushes. I’ll dip my fingers in it, sometimes.”

Wolffe’s brows lifted. “Yeah, I wouldn’t say that sounds like my kind of place. But I can imagine you in there. Meditating and stuff.”

Adi was aware Wolffe had a curiosity that extended beyond his primary interest at the moment, but she wasn’t going to let him know that. “See, it’s all about the imagination. A temple garden isn’t  _ just _ for meditation. Meditating is only the agent into the mind’s eye, but it’s up to you to be able to  _ see _ the garden.”

Wolffe nodded along to her hand gesticulations. “Maybe I’d end up manifesting something other than a garden.”

“My cousin says it’s supposed to be a  _ ‘mind’s sauna.’ _ ” Adi’s face pinched in regret at mentioning Stass. “So not exactly a simulation round.”

Wolffe looked her up and down again, except this time with a droll smile. “That’s what you think would appear for me? A simulation sequence?”

“Isn’t it?”

Wolffe searched her gaze expectantly. He enforced a pause in which Adi fought the urge to swallow hard, before he asked, “Say I was in there with you. Would my presence be a distraction to your...meditation? Do Jedi  _ have _ to be alone for that kind of thing?” 

There was an internal framework Adi had consummated through the graces of  _ Lush Ambience. _ It was an achievement to be cherished, one Adi had taken reticent pride in, but the image of Wolffe pressed close beside her in that very garden sparked a friction against it. 

“Jedi aren’t always alone when they meditate in the caverns,” Adi said quietly. 

“Have you ever thought about me while you were in there?”

Adi’s astonishment compressed her lungs. “What kind of a question is that?” 

“What?” Wolffe said, grinning. “It’s an innocent question.”

“Why would I be thinking about you while meditating in a sacred Jedi garden?” It was an easy objection to pull off due to the incongruity of the prospect with the customs of accessing a cavern. Despite her normally laid back nature, Adi’s expression in thought or feeling was never a subdued aspect of her. 

“It’s my intuition to presume I’ve given you something to think about.”

“You think you’re  _ that _ obnoxious a nuisance to the point where I’d need to extinguish my painstaking anger towards you by means of meditation?” Adi retorted sarcastically. 

“I don’t think I affect you in that particular way,” Wolffe reassured her. “Let’s just say my prediction is I’d be quite the distraction if we were locked in that garden together.”

_ Lush Ambience _ had been a blessing in Adi’s life. It harnessed an element of the eternal universal, as Master Yoda himself had told her. It bore connections to hundreds of force-infused constellations spread throughout the galaxy that would always be strung to Adi’s individualized core. 

And yet, after all of her training….all that  _ concentration… _ .Wolffe and his  _ presumptions _ were liquifying Adi’s knees into jelly. 

“Then I’m glad I’ve never had to dive into my soul with you right next to me,” she said, which was half true. 

“Some distractions are beneficial, General.” Wolffe had lowered his volume, like he’d suddenly decided it was appropriate to take cautionary measures.

“The premise of a distraction defeats the purpose of the garden,” Adi quipped challengingly. It surpassed her comprehension how Wolffe had inquired about a shamefully frequent, yet ignored, occurrence, and by bringing it up he’d practically solidified its validity. It was unfair, quite frankly. So she’d stand her ground for a bit longer. 

“What do you think we’d even do in there?” Wolffe asked, primed with a salacious element. “It’s basically a Jedi retreat for reconnecting, isn’t it?”

The last few threads of Adi’s self control vanished. “Depends on what it is that’s  _ connecting.” _

The innuendo took Wolffe by surprise; he swallowed, readjusting his physical stance. “Well. If I joined you in - uh, what’s the thing called again?”

“I never told you.”

“Well, does it have a name?”

“ _ Lush Ambience. _ ”

“ _ Lush Ambience.”  _ Wolffe whistled low under his breath. “Now, our minds may not be what necessarily conjoins in  _ Lush Ambience, _ but I’m sure we’d find other parts of ourselves to connect.”

He was planting fantasies that tainted the pure tenor of that temple garden; a sinful indulgence that shouldn’t be anything to suck her bottom lip between her teeth over, but here she was. “And that would be your clever distraction?”

“Exactly.”

Adi had gone from seeking the antidote that could extinguish the way she’d been feeling about Master Plo’s Commander, to having a heat flood to places that dreamed of what Wolffe had to offer beneath his armor. 

Adi’s submission to a persistent attraction suddenly dragged her to a realm of fantasy-like possibilities. Her speculations began to spill from her mouth, “You know, in all seriousness -”

“I  _ was _ being serious.”

“Wolffe.”

“Sorry, General. What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking there’s no reason why we couldn’t converge within the force, as well as...you know,  _ as well.” _

“You mean, like. Spiritually? Our minds?”

“Yes, that’s one way to think of it…”

“Like I said before, it doesn’t sound like my kind of place. In more ways than one.” 

Adi frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m not exactly a Jedi, General.” Wolffe had proven to be, on occasion, a hard man to read. His mannerisms were typically chalked with a solid neutrality. 

“I know that. You don’t have to be one.”

Wolffe’s feet scuffed on the floor. “I think I need to be one to be considered worthy enough to go near those gardens.”

“It’s a hypothetical situation, Wolffe,” Adi said, as gently as she could, although he wasn’t yet exuding a fair amount of hostility. “And anyway, you’re more than worthy enough to set foot in a temple garden.”

“That’s not what I’m supposed to think.”

“You can think whatever you want,” Adi clipped. The heat of the enticement she’d only just been cast with had cooled into dread. Was Wolffe going to unravel a point, or not? “But you should take my word on it, because I’ve been in there and I would know.”

“Isn’t that a bit of a contradiction?”

“How so?”

The corners on Wolffe’s lips had lowered marginally. It was one detail of several Adi used to measure the shift in their dynamic. “I can’t think for myself if I also have to take your word on stuff.”

“Are you kriffing kidd-” Adi paused on a stuttering breath. It came to her like a nauseating sickness that Wolffe was no longer directly referring to the temple garden. “I don’t understand. I was just saying I thought we’d be able to...”

_ To feel connected. Emotionally. Like there was something more between us. _ Wolffe wasn’t the only one who was required to perceive the galaxy a certain way. There were some concepts threaded deeply into the brain of reason that Adi had been trained to ignore. 

“Yeah,” Wolffe cut in flatly, exaggerating Adi’s inability to finish her  _ second _ contradiction. “And I was saying that would never happen. By law of nature, if you will.”

Adi’s lips pursed. “Oh, sure, but the  _ other _ thing could happen in your book?”

The cold wall of resentment was now apparent in the way Wolffe’s jaw tightened. “It’s more common than whatever you’re suggesting.”

“Common? It’s inappropriate,” Adi snapped. “It also surpasses the boundary I’m supposed to maintain between us.”

“Well, I’ve considered it, and so have you.” Wolffe managed to turn a few buckets nearby. He had a pronounced edge of intimidation that Adi was afraid might affect performance within the station. “What is that supposed to mean for us?  _ Unlawful misconduct? _ That’s stupid.”

Adi found her hard-ass approach didn’t properly exhibit her standpoint on the quarrel. “I wasn’t trying to offend you.”

“I’m not offended. But I can tell you’re still ashamed by all these...illicit topics.”

“Don’t tell me how I feel.”

“It’s just my opinion. My observation. Me exercising my right to think for myself.”

“Then maybe you should keep what you’re thinking geared towards war. Is that what you wanted to hear? My compound wouldn’t be in such a crisis right now if you did, anyway.”

Wolffe scoffed. “Being a blindly obedient machine has been my greatest honor in life so far, General. But don’t expect me to feel bad for the kriffing 91st.”

This time, Adi’s cheeks flushed a deep red tint from the shame clinging to the walls of her stomach. While she and Wolffe held an icy glare, Adi reverted back to that whirlwind of conflict she’d entered the center with.

“Watch your mouth,” she seethed. 

Then she pushed off the seat and stalked out of the station. 

What the hell was wrong with her today? She had practically rubbed the privilege of her leisure in her troops’ faces. It was unacceptable behavior. How had she lost sight of a goal so crucial to her integrity? 

Adi sprung up to the nearest holotable in the hall. She paid no mind to the fact that the officers and troopers toiling around this one were just as perturbed at the indiscreet drama unfolding as those spread all the way down the compound were. 

She turned aggressively to a trooper on her left. “Give me something to do - to sign, program, submit, whatever it is, just let me do  _ something.”  _

His hand snuck up to the receiver on the side of his helmet. “Sir, I - I think the station across the hall over there needs -”

But the rattled expression Adi saw form on the table’s main officer’s face was louder than whatever the trooper was saying. She looked behind her to follow the officer’s gaze and caught Wolffe’s figure jogging down Nine-Fifteen’s steps.

“Don’t follow me,” Adi barked, jerking back around.

“Come on, General, give me a chance to -”

“ _ No _ .” 

The low chatter that kept constant throughout the center dwindled momentarily, and an officer quickly took advantage of the awkward stillness to snatch Adi’s attention. 

“General Gallia,” he said frantically, forcing the trooper out of his spot to stand beside her. “The reports designated to my holotable could really use your -”

“That sounds great, Officer. Perfect,” Adi sighed in relief. 

In that moment, Wolffe had pressed up close to Adi’s other side, disrupting the flow of the area.

Adi inhaled sharply through the nose. “I thought I made it clear you are not permitted near me, Commander,” she growled, her narrowed eyes still fixed on the poor Officer. 

“For the love of -  _ gods, _ I’m back at square one with this.” Wolffe leaned sideways over the ‘table console, unconcerned by the buttons and levers that were consequently attacked by his gauntlet. He was stuck looking down at the white tendrils that sprouted from the back of her headdress, a viewpoint that wouldn’t do.

“I mentioned this a few minutes ago, but if you’re so inclined to keep me from any particular spot in the compound, you’ll always have the ability to -” Wolffe grunted in frustration. “General, can you look at me, please?”

Adi was dangerously close to complying. But the discomfited lines that worried across the Officer’s face reminded her of what she currently had at stake with her men. 

“Let’s proceed, Officer,” Adi mumbled impatiently, and beckoned him to lead the way. 

The Officer regained himself enough to lead her down the holotable aisle. Adi kept as close behind him as she could, hoping the graceful bounce in her tendrils conveyed professional motivation as she passed swarms of her troopers. 

“I’m Officer Billit, by the way, General.”

“Cool.”

“General Gallia, with all due respect - I’d really prefer we not end it on that note, okay? You can understand  _ that _ , at least, right? I’ll admit I was a bit out of line. I apologize for -”

“ _ Don’t _ you apologize to me.” Voices were being thrown at her from all sides as they maneuvered down the hall - and yet, Adi paid mind to the one capable of diverting her the most. 

“And I think I know exactly what kind of  _ note _ you want to end on, Commander Wolffe.”

“Well, that’s completely missing my point.”

The three of them arrived at Officer Billit’s holotable. It wasn’t ideal that Adi’s face was twisted up in repulsion, but at least for the troopers with maroon paint lining their armor, the evidence of her distress was very much visible. 

“What we need you to do is verify that these Reports abide by the Cruiser Codes of the Republic Logistics Center,” Billit said. Before Adi could blink he dumped a holotablet in her hands. “As of right now, we’re seventy-eight percent complete.”

“Wonderful,” Adi said slowly, and Billit was gone in a rush to tend to his pertinent issues. 

And Wolffe, of course, was still glued to her side. He watched as she leaned back against the edge of the console, lifting the ‘tablet before her to get started on the work. 

“Can we continue with our conversation now?”

“Do you not see how tight a schedule we’re on here?” Adi told the screen indignantly. “Our conversation is finished.”

“You weren’t very concerned about the schedule when we were talking, like, thirty seconds ago.”

Adi ignored him, deciding instead to uphold an air of authority. 

The Wolfpack battalion would never describe Wolffe as anything less than tenacious in his pursuits, however. 

“Look. I didn’t mean to take a turn there, General,” Wolffe said. “That’s my fault.”

Adi’s fierce eyes refused to shift in the direction of a man whose knuckles were rapping on the console in nervous anticipation of her attention. 

Wolffe cleared his throat. “I know you’re not going to believe me, but I didn’t mean what I said, either. About there being a strict law that says we can’t…um..”

He couldn’t really say it, either. 

The holotablet fell to Adi’s thighs. There was a moment where Wolffe stayed silent, watching intently as he failed to decipher Adi’s expression. Then, with a small pinch of regret shimmering in her eyes, she met his gaze. 

“You don’t have to say you didn’t mean it,” Adi said with a shrug. “You were right.”

“No. I wasn’t. At least, I don’t believe I was. Do you?”

“What are you trying to say?”

“That I think when we talk, just like this, talking about your garden, any seemingly insignificant detail about each other...I think that counts for some kind of connecting. Some quality time, maybe.” Wolffe flicked his eyes away, possibly because they’d turned quite the opposite of  _ cold _ . He paused. “Don’t you think?”

Clones might never comprehend why their uncanny ability to describe the truth of matters in distinguished detail, or at least relay honesty without the setback of doubt, was a gift. Adi couldn’t expose Wolffe to a lifestyle seized by ideology unrelated to war, but perhaps she could be his gateway to that one natural, ingrained sentient experience.

She smiled at him until he brought himself to look at her again. She stood off the holotable and made to leave from the spot. “Walk with me.”

Wolffe didn’t waste a second to fall into step behind her. 

The first clone Adi addressed was discussing the contents of one of the digitized screens implanted upon the console with another member of the 91st. 

“Excuse me, trooper,” Adi began. The finger he had tracing along the screen fell away as she proffered him the ‘tablet. “This section requires your direct input, correct?”

The trooper supported the bottom of the device and immediately took his time to scan it. 

“Am I technically like your escort right now?” Wolffe asked in a definite non-whisper from over Adi’s shoulder. 

Adi felt her chest tighten. The trooper standing beside her initial target, waiting to resume his conversation, glanced in a startled twist of his helmet at Wolffe. 

“Are you serious,” Adi deadpanned, her voice frustratingly hushed. Not that the two troopers couldn’t pick up every exchanged word. “Don’t screw up the chance I’m giving you.”

Wolffe bent down a little. “I’m not screwing it up. I’m taking advantage of it.”

“It’s obnoxious, Wolffe. Not charming.”

“I don’t understand why you say one thing, but you mean the complete opposite.”

Adi bristled. “Listen to me. I would like to keep you in here, but I can _ not _ if you keep giving me reasons to be upset with you,” she hissed. “Get it?”

“I think being your escort is enough reason not to kick me out.”

“No. Wolffe, you’re  _ not _ my escort -”

“Yes I am.”

“The attitude you have right now? This utter dumbass persona?”

“Ouch. Master Plo would never talk to me like that.”

“It’s irritating. Cut it out, and I promise we’ll have the chance to...resume.”

“Resume? Ooh, I like the sound of -”

The trooper, now supporting the full weight of the ‘tablet Adi’s hands had fallen off of, interrupted the banter with a few obnoxious coughs. 

“Uh, General Gallia? I cleared up the confusion on section C of Report A-92,” he declared firmly. Adi stared at him for a moment before taking the ‘tablet out of his clutch and examined the correction. “And, in my personal opinion, I think you should boot the Commander from the compound. Sir.”

“So do I,” the second trooper pitched in. “He’s creepy. Besides, we’ve already got  _ one _ Commander in here, and he’s pissed as karking -”

“Where is Commander Neyo, by the way?” Adi asked, frowning. 

Wolffe enacted his front of offense. “They’re not getting a free pass after what they just said, are they?”

“Over there, sir,” the second trooper said, and pointed. Adi followed the jab of his finger a few holotables down the aisle. 

The Commander of the 91st, with that distinct green mark running down his cheek, reigned all hell upon a shiny. Genuine surprise widened Adi’s eyes as she watched Neyo gesticulate wildly at whatever fuck-up the trooper had instigated. The shiny withered, probably one fleck of spit on his helmet away from trembling, beneath the fury etched in Neyo’s terrifying countenance. 

The overall reverberation of the center swallowed whatever Neyo was yelling, but the troopers in range were stuck stupefied in fright at the scene. 

Adi quickly averted her gaze.

“Holy Star Gods,” Wolffe laughed. “That guy won’t be living that down for  _ weeks. _ ”

Adi took off again, suddenly propelled by the distraught fit holding her hostage. Wolffe was at her heels, attune, somehow, to the overbearing stresses Adi was uncharacteristically falling prey to. 

“General Gallia, if you’re worried Commander Neyo’s head might turn into a grenade, my assumption is he just spent his last fuse on that shiny there,” said Wolffe. 

“I really need to focus,” Adi panicked. As she surveyed the ‘tablet and fished out her next aid, the portion of discernible reason that still thrived in her brain faintly offered some motivational advice:  _ Just tell him to leave. Do it. You know you can. Order him and his groupies to beat it, and your productivity will skyrocket. _

She shut her eyes for a brief moment. It was a hard deal to ignore. Or,  _ had _ been, at least. Wolffe had breathed down her neck for the past fifteen minutes, and yet….she’d known, sooner or later, that her priorities would undergo a confounding revision. 

The next trooper positioned along the holotable was alone, and due to the amount of visits he’d received from Officer Billit, seemingly restive. 

“I feel like you put a lot of pressure on yourself, General,” Wolffe remarked from beside her. Adi found guilty flattery in the way Wolffe’s brow worried itself over her impatient pacing, but his choice of phrasing….just happened to breach a dark cloud that reigned over the private part of her mind. 

“So which is it?” Adi shot at him suddenly. 

She’d been mulling a probing bug over in her head, but she didn’t know if she’d regret sharing it. The rational side of her wanted to maintain her ideal of professional sacrifice; but the emotional momentum Wolffe was instilling in her catapulted her to irrationality.

“Are you just a hypocrite? Is it only other people who aren’t allowed to tell you what you think?”

Watching Wolffe’s sturdy foundation of confidence slowly dissolve from his eyes gave Adi that extra flame she needed. 

“Or is forming an opinion about what someone else is going through just your idea of thinking for yourself?”

All in all, Wolffe seemed...more tired, than surprised. “I told you I didn’t mean some of what I said.”

“Yes, but that was about -” Adi glanced around quickly before lowering her voice, “- that was about whether or not  _ romance _ is capable of occurring between -”

“I know, I know,” Wolffe mumbled. Embarrassment made his face flush. “You know how it is. I just said some things to talk back, nothing more.”

“I’m not the only one who  _ contradicts _ themself, apparently.”

“General. I’d rather not get into this right now.”

“I still don’t know why you’re  _ here, _ Wolffe _. _ I’ve given you the benefit of the doubt because I -” 

Adi’s conscious mind tried to scramble back up from a blank vacuum while she watched Wolffe chew his bottom lip in apprehension. “I’d like for you to stay. With me... _ next _ to me, or whatever. But you have to understand that another part of me wants you to get the hell away from me.”

Wolffe then side-glanced through the jumble of activity at something. Adi looked, too, and was disheartened to see a freshly recomposed Neyo working his way up the aisle towards their holotable. 

She turned back in time to watch Wolffe nod solemnly at his boots, and to miss the eye contact Neyo was trying to throw her way. 

“I won’t tell you if you already know this or not,” Wolffe said, an underlying roughness emerging in his tone. “But I came because I think you should leave here with me. Like I’ve said before - like  _ Neyo’s _ said to you, probably, I don’t know - you’re not required in the bridge center, General.”

He’d demonstrated before that he wasn’t above rushing her; not that he had an accurate grasp on what the concept of  _ ‘rushing someone’ _ meant, Adi reasoned. 

Her head started spinning.

“Wolffe,” she tested her voice quietly, worried a shrill scream might erupt from her throat. “I can’t  _ believe _ you just propositioned me!” 

“Have I not been propositioning you ever since I got here?” he hissed back. “I wouldn’t be standing in front of you right now if I wasn’t confident you’d accept. In case you weren’t aware.”

People were usually blunt with Adi when it came to casualty counts, her tendency to utilize deceit as a tactic, or the conditions a whole planet underwent due to the Republic’s treatment. She didn’t think she’d still be seated on the Jedi Council for the day she couldn’t handle factual reality being relayed to her face. 

“I can’t just say yes to something like that right now,” she fussed. What in the fuck had given Wolffe the nerve, anyway? They were in a professional setting, surrounded by  _ hundreds _ of troopers. 

“You can’t, or you won’t?”   


“Oh, please. I definitely don’t have time for games, either.”

“As far as I’m concerned,  _ you’ve _ been the one playing a game this whole time.”

“Hey, General. You making headway on the primary faction?” Neyo interrupted.

Adi and Wolffe turned in tandem to where Neyo stood a couple of feet away. The ghost of the wrath he’d unleashed projected through his eyes and rigid bearing, but Adi feared the negligence of her promises might stir it back to life. 

“Commander Neyo,” Adi began slowly. “Hi. I’ve been making progress, you could say…”

“That’s great,” Neyo said, nodding. He was an efficient multitasker - they all were, as Adi had gathered - and was able to inflict a sense of admonishment while he hooked his datapad up to the holotable and punched out more work than what Adi had completed in the past half hour. “You’re not burnt out at all yet, are you? Because if you’re in need of a break, General Gallia, you’re not required to inform -”

“Actually, sir,” Wolffe cut in sharply, “That’s an excellent suggestion. I personally see no reason why Master Gallia wouldn’t be willing to leave her post -”

“ _ Quiet. _ ” Adi whacked her hand against Wolffe’s arm plate. “Commander Neyo wasn’t suggesting anything, Wolffe, so shut it.” She turned back to Neyo, who possessed a rather sardonic quality at the moment. 

“I’m not going anywhere, Neyo,” she said. “No need to be concerned.”

Wolffe relinquished the daggers he glared into Neyo to cast a sidelong look of what one may misinterpret as sullen. Adi caught it, and even looked back intently enough to perceive the desperation tinting the golden hue of his eyes.

But Neyo was there, on the scene, with the clear objective to survey them closely like a babysitter. 

Adi got moving without further delay, and plucked the holotablet from the troublemaker shiny, who’d ended up stunned to decent behavior due to eavesdropping on his General and Wolfpack’s Commander.

“Be honest. Did I or did I not prove to be a notable distraction to you?” Wolffe asked. “Like how I said I would be, if you remember.”

He followed her as she haughtily pattered up to the next busy trooper and dumped the ‘tablet into his unprepared hands. 

“All you’ve managed to do is argue with me, y’know?” she bantered. “We’ve been going in circles, and  _ circles.  _ I think that should tell you something.”

“Oh, yeah? What does that tell me?”

Adi remained with her back to him, refusing to engage in conversation eye to eye. She was more mindful than Wolffe was of Neyo’s scrutinous watch, but he hadn’t shown up to indulge her insecurities. 

“It means I will continue to ignore your pestering. And I’ll be on the verge of ordering you to stay away from me.”

“You’re aware of the fact that you outrank Neyo, right? Like, your position of authority is higher than his?”

“Just so  _ you’re _ aware, Commander,” Neyo called, exuding the kind of hostility that rattled a shiny’s plastoid plates. “If someone was bothering you as badly as you are the General, you'd have bit them in the throat.”

Wolffe had his naturally dour comportment on his side as he shot Neyo a look. “The General’s welcome to try that, if she feels so inclined.”

Adi interjected fiercely, “There are many things I’d like to do to you, at this point.”

Her tone of voice executed a singular, definite meaning behind the statement, and yet a bewilderment shambled over anyone who heard her retort. 

Adi, utterly abashed, kept her eyes trained wildly on Wolffe and tried to ignore the influx of helmets swivelled in her direction. 

“Am I allowed to inquire what kinds of things, sir?” he chortled.

“That is  _ so -  _ I didn’t mean it like…” Adi spluttered, her glower converting evil. She turned it on one of the nearby shinies undutifully invested in the behavior of their superiors. 

“What the hell are you looking at?!” she spat at him, before prying the holotablet out of whoever’s hands and storming off. 

Neyo whizzed forward like a laser bullet to tug back Wolffe’s elbow before he could chase after Adi again. 

“Wolffe,” Neyo said warningly. “Either make yourself useful or beat it. That’s an order, and I’m serious.”

“Let him stay, Neyo,” Adi said flatly. She couldn’t help it. Wolffe was an easy choice to blame for her loss of sanity; the truth was, however, that she’d been going crazy running around the compound long before he’d shown up. 

She was tucked around her holotable, on the opposite side of the tall holochart just enough to where Neyo’s disappointment was out of sight. 

As Wolffe picked his way over to her, she struggled to sync the ‘tablet up to the console until the trooper beside her wisely took the task from her hands.

“How long are you going to keep this up?” he asked her somewhat gently, as soon as he’d pressed into her bubble of space. “Can I get some type of warning here?”

A sigh of sincerity escaped Adi’s mouth. He was right. She was trying to speed ahead of her self-deceit, running on Neyo’s chronometer, a game her attraction to Wolffe would inherently abolish. 

“You can’t live substantially when you dishonor your integral commitments,” Adi said defeatedly. “No one was designed to always get what they want, so...I just  _ don’t get _ what’s going on with me.”

Wolffe took a blank moment. “Okay. Sure….What’s that got to do with anything?”

“It’s got to do with everything.” Adi couldn’t stop the smile that spread, and when she tilted her head up with a cocked brow, she could anticipate the humorously nonplussed look on Wolffe’s face.

He bent down a bit to hover his lips somewhere above her ear. “If a cup of caf will help bring your senses back, my previous offer still stands.”

A giggle burbled out from Adi’s throat - an uncharacteristic and possibly stress-driven occurrence, but the chances of it being a showcase of inadequacy grew obsolete as Wolffe blurted out a laugh with her. 

“I swear I’m  _ fine. _ I don’t need caf.”

“Will a philosophical seminar do it for you?”

“Make me sit through one of those right now and I’ll nosedive off a cruiser.”

“Then it’s got to be the tension, General. Let me take you back to your cabin and I’ll -”

“ _ Stop. _ ”

Wolffe agitated a tremor deep in the core of Adi until it became too pronounced to disregard. Her stomach muscles contracted as she was seized with laughter, her hand flying out to clutch at Wolffe’s arm. 

The alarm that took hold of the area was understandable. Adi glowed with a liveliness unfitting for the occasion, unfitting for  _ any _ occasion she was typically seen in around any of her men. 

But the giggling, ringing outwardly without shame, flowed from her lips naturally and with a feminine enchantment not many men in the compound could object to. 

The source of Adi’s joy still chopped a disparity between her and the 91st: Wolffe, who similarly exhibited a shade of sentiment outside his realm of comfortability.

“I think you’re frightening the shinies, General. Wow,” Wolffe told her. He was suddenly enraptured with what he and everyone else heard, gazing at Adi with a fond look as if he’d seen celebratory patterns of color burst across the night sky and was excitedly waiting to catch another glimpse.

It didn’t take a lot to compose herself. Adi fizzed down to a cordial version of herself. She cleared her throat only slightly, glancing at the holotables situated around her almost disinterestedly. 

“ _ General. _ I don’t want to be a General right now,” she remarked.

Wolffe instinctively leaned into the light touch she’d twiddled at his elbow, a mechanism prompted by the curiosity apparent in the other troopers. “No?”

“No.” Adi officially retracted her hand. “When we’re alone, you don’t need to call me General.”

“ _ When _ we’re alone? You make that sound so promising.”

Adi tried to hide a flustered expression of embarrassment with a shrug. “Um. Or ‘sir,’ you don’t have to say sir, either. I’m open to dropping formalities when there’s no one else around who’s required to abide by regulations.”

Wolffe couldn’t hide the smirk on his face if he tried. “Uh-huh. And when is this hypothetical situation supposed to play out? Soon?”

“....I don’t know.” She had to part from the increasing intensity of their eye contact. Adi was now aligned with Wolffe, one hand upturned on the bony jut of her hip while the other pressed inert on the holotable. 

She watched a different one that rested a few centimeters away, it’s smallest gloved finger considerably larger than her own longest one. The hand twitched forward, mindful of her gaze, establishing its effort to  _ reach _ for Adi’s -

“Do I need to clear the room?” 

It was the troopers’ trepidation of their austere Commander that gave Neyo’s voice its booming effect. Adi and Wolffe were stuck in a disorienting search for a moment; they found him across the aisle, busy at a holotable on the right side of the center. 

“Not for us, sir,” Wolffe joked, swiftly pulling his hand away.

“Don’t make insinuations like that, Commander,” Adi rebuked. She swore she could see Neyo’s eyes roll, but...she and Wolffe probably deserved it. 

“My apologies, sir,” Neyo droned.

Adi turned away from the Commander with the dawning realization that her future endeavors were sealed like a promise, and had been for the majority of her time spent in the bridge center. 

She shared a fleeting look with Wolffe.

The next few minutes passed with Adi’s stomach performing portent somersaults. It was up to her to tame her prancing whims, an act that should’ve hopefully restored the Republic’s creed of normalcy to her troops. 

But...Adi was nerve-wracked. 

And she didn’t have much reason not to be, when her spark-wired cousin seemed to have better insight on the exigencies of Adi’s body than she did herself. 

She strolled down the aisle with Wolffe, pretending like their lack of unruly arguing wasn’t just as distracting as the corporeal display of them together. 

An officer or two would refrain from addressing her, just pass a datapad or datatablet in her path, and she’d pick up the memo to quickly insert her authorization code. Only moments later it became common for the officers to send a trooper over, a shiny who’d jog up to Adi if his ‘table wasn’t already close by. 

Initially, it had been the ARC troopers whom she’d noticed were making themselves scarce, but she let the observation sit in the back of her mind the more diligently Wolffe enchanted her. 

From behind his shoulder plate, a station’s blue gleam of technology up in the wall across the hall dimmed to a lifeless gray. Adi retraced her thoughts as her eyes followed who appeared to be the last trooper plod down the steps, rendering that particular station empty and inoperative. He then made his way through the hall, the crowd in which having grown gradually more...dispersed. 

Adi had half the mind to fume. “That  _ bastard, _ ” she suddenly groused. 

She received a taken aback look from Wolffe, who hadn't meant for her to feel particularly indignant about the time he chewed out a Lieutenant Colonel off-world. “Well, to be honest, if I were in his shoes -”

“Excuse me a second, Wolffe, will you?”

Adi hardly waited for his nod before she hurried off, leaving Wolffe disoriented in her paranoid dust. 

She tailed down the unfortunate shiny by the distinctive paint patterns chipped along his cuirass and mirrored down on his shin plates. 

“Hey, trooper,” she said, and the hand she had obtrude into his path spooked him like a tooka in speederlights.

His heels were slipping on a click to attention before Adi demanded, “Where do you think you’re going?”

“My apologies, sir,” the trooper piped. He offered Adi a small shrug of regret, before confirming, “It was Commander Neyo’s orders.”

Adi gnawed the side of her tongue. She held back from inquiring where he and his station were relocating. There was no authentic  _ regret _ in him, or in any of the surrounding troopers and officers, who could no longer blatantly shut their holotables down and make to take their work someplace else at the expense of Adi’s knowledge. 

All she found were the sprinklings of pity. 

“Don’t leave this center,” she told the shiny firmly. “You stay right where you are.”

“Sir.”

Adi spun angrily on her heel. “Neyo!”

His voice emerged, clear and cutting, over an uprising of groans and complaints echoing that their progression into the scheme would no doubt reduce to a suspension. “Yes, General?”

She was quick to find and approach him. He was leaning back on the edge of a holotable with his arms crossed, remaining as unmoved as the barricade he had been fortifying between his troopers and Wolffe’s hooligans. Neyo’s natural ability to wield the whip of control had always been something of his Adi admired. 

“You’re evacuating the room?” she accused. “For kriff’s sake, Neyo!”

Adi deteriorated beneath a stare that encapsulated the refusal to relinquish power. Neyo cleared his throat. “Yeah. I am. Hey, look here a second…”

Adi found she no longer had anywhere else to run off to. Neyo slowly shuffled to his feet, pressed a bit closer to her, and somewhat melted not into a figure of pity, or resentment, but rather that of sympathy. 

He sucked in a breath of preparation that Adi couldn’t have known she’d need as well. “General, it’s no secret you’re not entirely yourself right now. I should point out that the antidote to your issue, specifically, that might achieve the end of loosening you up a bit….isn’t entirely unheard of.”

A response to whatever that meant was difficult to conjure. “I’m sorry. What?”

“Y’know, this  _ thing _ that’s been going on in the center,” Neyo said, brows quirked expectantly, but Adi wasn’t catching on. She felt bare without the proper perceptibility to contemplate these kinds of riddles. 

“Okay, let me be less blunt,” Neyo continued. “You know more than anyone that I’ll bust up the lousy suckers trying to lounge in fantasy land while brothers waste away in the Outer Rim, but I am not opposed to my General regulating whatever means necessary that she feels will keep her attune to her sanity.”

Adi blinked. “Neyo. What the fuck are you talking about.”

“Sir.” His bottom lip rolled under his front teeth to stifle a splutter of laughter, before he reiterated, “I’m talking about Commander Wolffe, General. I understand if you need to….um, pardon me, but get it out of your system.”

Her heart rate was poisoned with an unhealthy dose of disbelief. “I really hope you’re not being serious.”

Neyo cautiously dropped a hand on her shoulder, desperate to get his point across. “I know how important it is to you to help out with all the filing work. But I’ve got it covered for now, okay? No need to worry about it.”

“Commander, stop it.” Adi flinched his hand off so she could face him properly. No commanding tone of voice she hoped to project could mask her pleadful intent. “We don’t just allow those kinds of….perversities, like what you’re suggesting here.”

“Perversities? Oh come on..” Neyo groaned. If anyone was going to show leniency for Adi’s ridiculously prolonged bluff, it would’ve been the iron-fisted marshall commander, but the chrono ticks were bringing him closer to a confrontation he’d rather avoid. 

“ _ Sir. _ May I?”

Adi cast her eyes to her feet, feeling stupid. “Go ahead.”

“You and I see eye to eye on a lot of things, General. Protocol is protocol, but I can admit it helps when you’ve got a good relationship with your superior. General Windu’s great, you know that, but flexibility in style goes a longer way than tightass.”

It was all too easy to tell herself she didn’t deserve to hear any of that. Dwelling on pessimism felt like a waste of their time. She lifted her head to accept the exchange of good faith, and it was just as well; Neyo waited to continue until she’d locked her gaze onto his. 

“With that being said, I don’t expect anything extra of you. You’ve never once given me cause to want you to make anything up to us, which should go without saying. I’m grateful for your contribution in the bridge center, General. However...it  _ is _ my ass that gets busted when the file submission isn’t completed by rendezvous.”

She’d never acted as foolishly as she had aboard this cruiser, and she nodded at him in understanding. Her time to wrap up the nonsense and accept that ‘righteous’ behavior involved a bit of credibility, was long overdue. 

“Let me take control in here, please, General,” Neyo said. “And frankly, it’s not up to me what you do or how you do it. It won’t change what you and the 91st have going on, if you’re at all worried about that.”

Adi had one more requirement if she was going to, for once, officially give in to nature’s call, and not the force’s. She was silently unrelenting against his equally unspoken urging of her to take a turn to speak. They smiled at one another as Neyo took his cue to indulge her. 

“I am not alluding to anything specific. I promise. That’s on the record.”

“Thank you.”

Neyo’s cordial grin faded a bit. “So, I have to be allowed to do my job. Quickly and efficiently. Without unnecessary distractions. Sir.”

The application of Adi’s ethics required a choice; to the immediate cause, in which the scale for what was acceptable expanded exponentially, or to the abstinent virtue of the Jedi. 

Sneaking a glance down the hall, she glimpsed at Wolffe discreetly berating the Wolfpack troopers for distracting a few holotables, his charm having dissipated with the absence of her presence. She had no reason to watch him for long; her decision had flourished the second she was escorted from Grievous's ship.

“Okay,” she finalized quietly. “Yes, you go on right ahead. You can tell everyone to remain where they are, or move them somewhere else, whatever you prefer...but I’ll depart from the compound.”

Neyo’s hand reached out to lightly squeeze just above Adi’s elbow. “It’s no problem, General,” he reassured her.

She then watched as he left to go take command of the bridge center, the steps in his stride swiftly revitalized as if he was heading off from a finished hologram call with that blue senator Adi knew he fancied. 

At his direction, the center quickly filled up like a mess hall. Adi wouldn’t have called it a  _ wave _ of troopers, an officer or two sprinkled amongst them, but spilling through the front doors was a fair amount of the original compound body count. 

The holotables lined up and down the hall glowed back to life, their power couplings whirring awake, as the 91st settled back into place. 

An efficient, productive place, Adi mused, without  _ her.  _

A highly opinionated signature Adi felt approaching her from behind swam faster at each step with craving. 

“Damn. That man is a stealthy son of a bitch, I’ll give him that,” came the gruff voice of Wolffe.

Adi slowly rotated, expecting the pit of failure to wallow in her stomach, but an empty void remained.

“He kicked me out.”

A hopeful radiance swept over the features of Wolffe’s face. “Oh. You’re not..objecting?”

Adi shrugged. “No. I don’t think so.”

Her sudden passiveness made Wolffe cautious to the enthusiasm-filled spring coiling in his joints. “That makes two of us, then. I booted my boys out of here too. They can dunk their heads in the ‘fresher toilets if they want to stay entertained, but the 91st’s busy.”

Adi cast a small palm down the hall.  _ Sooner rather than later, right? _

“I guess the both of us are headed out, then?” she asked. 

Wolffe leveled his gaze down on hers, subtly, before nodding in the direction of the entrance. He was good at this, despite Adi’s lack of credit. 

“It’s your call, General. I’m about ready to wrap things up in here, myself.”

They promptly left the center. For some reason, she wasn’t all that self conscious that she hadn’t been able to hold her ground. Hardly anyone turned a head at their General walking down the hall, side by side with Commander Wolffe. It was old, and yet quite fresh, news. 

The fluid motion of the doors sealing them off from the bridge center was the equivalent to a heavy weight miraculously lifting from off her shoulders. Even so, her nerves were powerfully activated; which wasn’t exactly a feeling she was used to. 

“You’ll need me to escort you to your quarters..don’t you?” Wolffe asked her, but his voice was husky and low, and his torso curved down into her space. 

Adi didn’t mind at all that his face was as close to hers as it was when she glanced at him. “That was a given. You’re not off the hook just yet.”

She watched a smile overtake his mouth. Her eyes lingered on this particular view, marveling at how his face could look so perfect from every possible angle. 

Wolffe barely snapped back up to his full posture before Adi tugged him back down. She got up on her toes and angled her mouth near his ear to whisper, 

“Besides, you and I have to try out that Temple garden distraction.”


End file.
